Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain is Charles Frazier's 1997 debut novel, the National Book Award winner and the canonical contemporary American novel about the Civil War from the Confederate-deserter side. The structural premise is the parallel journeys of W. P. Inman (a wounded Confederate infantryman who deserts a Petersburg military hospital in 1864 to walk home across the Carolinas) and Ada Monroe (the Charleston-bred daughter of a Cold Mountain Episcopal minister who has died, leaving Ada unable to manage the mountain farm she has inherited and that the war has stripped of any remaining labor). The novel alternates Inman's westward walk and Ada's daily survival on the farm with the local mountain-woman Ruby across the months leading up to the December 1864 reunion.

Frazier's structural method is the patient eighteenth-century-pastoral prose register applied to a nineteenth-century-historical-realist subject; the novel reads in the literary tradition that Cormac McCarthy established in Blood Meridian and that Frazier extends with a slightly gentler natural-world attention. The Inman chapters are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about a specific kind of physical-historical walking; the food procurement, the bridge-and-river crossings, the encounters with bushwhackers and refugee former slaves and home-guard search parties are rendered with the kind of patient historical-realist texture the genre has not always committed to. The Ada-and-Ruby farm chapters operate as the structural counterpoint and run some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about subsistence agriculture in the late-Confederate Carolinas.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Frazier entry point, and as one of the canonical contemporary American novels about the Civil War. Compare to E. L. Doctorow's The March, Geraldine Brooks's March, and the broader contemporary American historical-fiction tradition. The 2003 Anthony Minghella film with Jude Law and Nicole Kidman is competent if more sentimental than the source novel. The Charles Frazier-narrated audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.